


The Dating Game

by Guede



Series: Theory [4]
Category: Hornblower (TV), King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Bathroom Sex, Blow Jobs, Crime Scenes, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Gossip, Humor, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, M/M, Multi, Past Child Abuse, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:28:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Dating in the modern world is...complicated, to say the least.
Relationships: Arthur Castus/Guinevere/Lancelot, Gawain/Tristan (King Arthur 2004)
Series: Theory [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058675
Kudos: 3





	1. Pet Shop Boys

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2005.

“Duck!”

Just then, something gray and white and huge-eyed whizzed past, a hair above Gawain’s head. He jerked to the floor, ass and heels of hands hitting first, and twisted almost in the same movement barely in time to see the store clerk net the sugar glider. The clerk, who was about sixteen and looked as jangled as a lifetime wino jumping on the wagon, let out a ragged gasp of relief. It was probably his first-ever job.

Tristan ambled up to Gawain and put down a hand for Gawain to grab. “Not bad, considering it had to swerve around the macaw,” he said, hauling Gawain onto his feet.

“If you say so. I wouldn’t know.” Gawain watched the clerk slip the escaped sugar glider back into its cage. Beside the man was the mom-and-brat set that’d wanted to see it in the first place, and that’d blatantly disobeyed instructions to not let it free. The little girl was screaming about free Willy and poor widdle squirrels, the mother merely shared harried looks with the clerk, and the glider…Gawain was probably imagining things, but it seemed to have a devilish glint in its eyes.

“Same expression as Lancelot.” Possibly not. If Tristan saw the same thing, then the chances of it being reality shot up a hell of a lot.

The aisle with the rodent supplies was right next to the sugar glider cage, so they passed by it on their way to load up; Tristan’s hawk could be a bit finicky and so he raised a few specialty breeds of mice to sweeten her up whenever she was having a fit. They were eying the fifty different brands of identical rodent bedding when something snicked—the sugar glider was clinging to the front of the cage and boldly eying them.

Though Lancelot didn’t come around campus as much as Guinevere did, Gawain had seen him and Arthur together enough times to know when to exit the room and lock the door. It really was eerie how that glider’s look resembled the one Lancelot got just before Arthur started to stammer and flush.

“I think he’s taken a liking to you.” Tristan was slowly scanning the rows and shelves of products for his brand. When he found it, he rose on his toes to haul down a good-sized bag.

Gawain wasn’t exactly sure how to take that. He double-checked the glider, found that its gaze was indeed fixed on him, and hastily turned away to grab more supplies from the shelves. For some reason, it just made his nerves jumpy to see that kind of expression on a small furry thing. “Right, bedding. I’ve got the food and the new toys. Do we need anything else?”

“It might like Galahad even better.” The bag bounced and squished in front of Gawain’s face as Tristan examined it for holes. He didn’t offer any explanation of his weird comment.

‘It’ couldn’t be anything but the sugar glider, and the glider’s way of expressing affection, as implied by Tristan, was…buzzing people. Ah. “No. Look, I know he’s a bit…okay, he can be bitchier than a PMS-ing woman. But the tossing things at him doesn’t really help. He’s not my roommate just because he helps pay the bills.”

“So no glider.” The bag came down and Tristan nodded towards the register. “That’s it.”

He was being especially noncommittal, which worried Gawain. Admittedly, Tristan didn’t seem to react to much, but that was mostly his facial expressions and his voice. Watching his way of moving and listening to how much sound he made seemed to be a better indication of how he felt, though at this point that was just a preliminary hypothesis of Gawain’s.

It’d only been a few weeks, but frankly, being with Tristan was so ridiculously easy that Gawain sometimes didn’t want to breathe too hard. On the other hand, Galahad went all the way back as far as Gawain could remember. “I…if this goes anything like my other boyfriends, he’ll knock it off after another week.”

Tristan’s eyebrow faintly twitched upward, but he didn’t break stride. “What’s he afraid of?”

That was a complicated question. And usually it took longer than that for people to figure out that that was the one to ask, so Gawain had to take a moment to be impressed. Then he had to take another moment to decide just how he wanted to play it, considering that he’d actually been stretching a bit. If this had been a normal progression, Galahad should’ve been distracted by tits a couple days ago.

“Well…” Not to mention this was a pet store with nosy little children running around, and God know Gawain didn’t want this overheard. Hell, he’d never even tried telling the whole truth to anyone—Galahad already knew it, having been there—but he wanted to now. For one, he had a feeling Tristan would be able to tell he was lying no matter how he dressed it up. The other man probably wouldn’t comment on it, but that was exactly what was going to make things uncomfortable: Gawain wouldn’t be able to read his reaction well enough for that to not matter.

There was a small, semi-isolated section formed by the cat-food aisle and the beginning of the reptiles. Gawain sidestepped into it and pretended to be watching the baby crocodiles swim around. He heard Tristan come up beside him, but it was a little longer before he finally got everything straight in his head. Mostly. He’d get things ordered up and then another wisp of hair would fall in front of Tristan’s face, and he’d forget a bit.

“L. A. ghettos, you know. Not the most friendly place in the world. First guy I ever saw was in denial—okay, anyone who liked guys had to keep it low around there, but that wasn’t all it for him. I cut things off for other reasons and he…acted like a bastard and mouthed off in front of the wrong people and almost got me tossed in a dumpster.” One of the crocodiles wriggled up to the front of the tank and then just floated there, little beady eyes rolling to track Gawain’s every move. Weird—wild animals completely ignored Gawain and instantly went for Tristan.

Well, predator. Maybe it was that old saying about smelling fear, though Gawain couldn’t remember enough basic bio to know whether crocodiles had a sense of smell. And anyway, he was over it and three thousand miles long gone.

“Galahad happened to be in the next room—his mom dumped him with us whenever she wanted to hit the casinos for a month or so—and he ended up with this two-inch scar on his back.” Gawain re-hefted his armful and leaned back to look at Tristan. The other man wasn’t moving the muscles in his cheeks or jaw or forehead, but his eyes were digging around in Gawain’s skull. It was a boost to know that Gawain could take that without having a fit about it, or wet eyes or anything. “Funny, you know…he still thought it was disgusting and he was maybe fifty pounds less than the other guy, but he didn’t hesitate to jump him.”

Tristan nodded and slowly scanned away from Gawain to unfocus his eyes at the chameleons and think on something. “He doesn’t still think it’s disgusting, does he?”

“Nah. I mean, he doesn’t want to see it, but he’s okay with it all. It sort of relates to his mom—when she wasn’t gambling, she was hanging around this freakish garage-priest. Ended up running off with him, so hell if I know what the guy was preaching, but it wasn’t exactly Christianity. Had the trappings, though, and so Galahad kinda hates anything it says.” The other part was that Galahad was, when he settled down to notice, actually more reliant on reason than Gawain was. Gawain liked men, Gawain wasn’t someone Galahad personally found disgusting, so things didn’t compute. Or so Galahad had mumbled one night while they were driving through Kansas on the way to New York. “Um. Don’t let Galahad know I told you that. He’s touchy about her.”

Gawain was about to mention the other bits when Tristan finished thinking and snapped his head down, concluding…whatever it was he did up in his mind. Sometimes Arthur did that when working out a particularly knotty problem—all the calculations showed in his eyes, but they were so damned complicated that Gawain couldn’t even begin to guess for what they were supposed to solve.

“You’re right. He’s not that bad.” And just like that, the pivot of Tristan’s heel as he turned towards the checkout lanes told Gawain that the man had gotten all of that without needing to be told. “When he keeps his mouth shut.”

“I’m working on that,” Gawain muttered, somewhat embarrassed. But overall, he was pretty damn relieved. He also wanted to smile, but the kind of grin that was yanking on his mouth felt like one that might be easily misinterpreted—not by Tristan, but by that brat who was still in the store and who was now babbling about the pretty gold bits in that man’s hair. Sometimes Gawain hated how easily his hair got sun-streaked. “I think he’s just pissy because he’s finally run up against a girl he can’t charm.”

Tristan betrayed a bit of a smirk as he deposited the items from his and Gawain’s arms onto the check-out belt. “Mariette does have a very low opinion of men. She had a little crush on Arthur for a while, and I think it gave her extremely high standards.”

“You—wait, you guys know her? I thought she was an exchange student?—oh, wait. You were…” Actually, Gawain had never figured out exactly what Tristan’s origins were. As homogenized-newscaster as Tristan’s accent was, occasionally a little edge of _something_ else slipped into it. Especially when he was moaning…oh, hell. Not in front of the fucking kid, Gawain sternly told himself.

“Vaguely. Arthur and I were in Paris for a while at the Sorbonne. Both Mariette’s parents are professors there. They were…protective.” A credit card flicked between Tristan’s fingers and he held it out to the clerk, who stared in awe for a second before taking it. While the swipe was being processed, Tristan started to bag up everything. “It’s probably why she’s here—they would’ve wanted her to go somewhere where they could annoy faculty into updating them on her.”

Before Tristan could take everything, Gawain sneaked in a hand and claimed the heaviest items. In serendipitous timing, the clerk shoved the receipt for Tristan to sign so the other man couldn’t do anything except let Gawain. “So does Arthur?”

That tiny, surprisingly engaging grin flashed across Tristan’s face again. “He recommended her to be Kitty’s grad student for a reason. He’s very firm about personal independence. And actually not that bad at stalling people.”

Sounded like him, even if Gawain couldn’t picture it in his head. Then again, the very last Gawain had seen of Arthur before the weekend had started was him being lip-sucked into the front passenger seat by Guinevere. It was a much more vivid image than Gawain’s memory of how Arthur had coolly ordered around Interpol.

When they stepped outside, the whining of the little girl was finally replaced by the sounds of NYC traffic, which wasn’t much better but to which Gawain was more accustomed. While Gawain loaded their purchases in the backseat, Tristan slid into the front and began the strange voodoo that made his big panther of a car-wreck run like a dream. Gawain had tried to drive it exactly once and had stalled it in the middle of what had been thankfully a little-used intersection. Nevertheless, the memory still made him blush.

He twisted around and sat himself down in his seat as Tristan was backing out, which was always nerve-wracking and amazing to see. The man did it perfectly with only one hand and with his eyes on the radio, which he was tuning with the other. Which was why Gawain kept his eyes closed while Tristan did it. “Your apartment’s closer, unless you wanted to make any stops along the way.”

“Nope.” Gawain heard the wheels bump from parking lot concrete to regular tar and opened his eyes. His hand hurt, and when he looked down, he saw he’d locked it around the door handle. He quickly pried it off, hoping to God Tristan hadn’t noticed, knowing the man had anyway and not caring too much about it. Which wasn’t a response that made sense in any other context than Tristan. “Actually, Galahad—” snicker “—okay, I should feel more sorry for him, but…well, Arthur and Kitty are collaborating on these papers. And so today Galahad’s at the g-brary, attempting to work with Mariette.”

“She probably won’t kill him.” Though Tristan didn’t sound all that serious. He found a station with a good beat and sank back into the cushions, head tipping up so he was staring at the road through half-closed eyes and hanks of hair.

When Gawain reached across and tucked some of it back, Tristan rolled his head to give Gawain a look that—thank God there weren’t any kids now. “So he’s not coming back to your place till—”

“Dinner-ish.” Gawain grinned back and let his fingers drift down to feather along Tristan’s jaw before he drew back. “I always thought French sounded sexy. You learn any of it while you were over there?”

The corners of Tristan’s lips pulled back to show a hungry set of white teeth. Then he casually turned back to the road and Gawain suddenly remembered what that meant. Oh, _fuck_.

He grabbed the strap above the window and shoved his heels against the floor just as Tristan floored it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title was suggested by LJ user linaelyn.


	2. Exhibitionist

“Must’ve had a plump back end.” Tilting his head, Lancelot peered more closely at the exaggerated curve of the armor. He was fiddling with his tie under the guise of absentmindedness, but the way he let the ends slip slowly through his fingers had a suspicious deliberateness to it. Not to mention at least three people had had a close encounter with a halberd because they were distracted by how his arse seemed to be curving out for a pat of the hand.

Or something else, but the glossy museum flier the greeter at the entrance had shoved at Arthur wouldn’t work nearly well enough. Also, he reminded himself, Lancelot had promised to not get them banned from the Met, and so far he hadn’t done anything concrete to break his word. Therefore Arthur had no solid ground on which to base any possible complaints.

“Think they had Freud back then?” Now Lancelot was reading the information plaque for the Renaissance-era ceremonial armor. His tie rapidly flipped back and forth between his fingers before suddenly unknotting in a bizarre thumb-twist. For a moment he let it lie, but very soon he was running his fingers up and down it. “Seem to have spent a lot of energy protecting their arses. And it must’ve been uncomfortable as hell to ride in.”

“That one wasn’t for riding. Probably the most anyone ever did in it was walk from one end of the throne room to the other.” Arthur did his best to ignore Lancelot’s teasing. He slipped the flier into a waste-can before his reflexes took over and cast about for the exhibit in which he was actually interested.

In which he was _currently_ interested. The Arms and Armor room was always a secret favorite of his, but he’d seen it so many times that he could pick out the newest pieces to be rotated in merely by standing at the door and noting the location of glints. At the moment, the Met was having a special exhibit of rare early Dark Age cavalry armor—in fact, those helmets sticking out behind the katanas should be the beginning of it.

Tie fully undone and flapping about his neck, Lancelot sauntered beside Arthur as if he owned the museum. “Armor. I would’ve thought you’d spend all your time in the Cloisters.”

“Do I look like the medieval type?” Arthur idly asked, stooping over a case of broadswords. He admired the detailed engraving on one of the blades; if he was correct, it was a form of early British writing and it had been done so skillfully that the lettering almost appeared to be a watermark in the steel.

“Well…” The heat of Lancelot’s thigh briefly seeped into Arthur’s leg as the other man bumped them together. Very nonchalantly, as if they were doing nothing more than jostling for a good view. “You can be rather chivalrous. And I’ve never seen so many editions of the Bible in my life—you’ve got what, a yard and a half of shelves for them?”

Over in the corner was a reconstructed suit of what a nomadic warrior from around the Black Sea would have worn. Or at least that was how the plaque identified it, but the wording was interestingly vague, and to Arthur’s eye the armor was obviously from further east. “I’ve got that many because philosophers right up to and including modern times frequently based entire political systems on two or three lines from the Bible. And you can trace quite a few ideological wars to two people quoting the same passage from different versions of it.”

“Wonder why they keep bothering to use it, then,” Lancelot snorted. His tone was light, but some old quarrel echoed beneath it.

Arthur glanced at him and he stared back, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other in a half-serious dare to comment. Then he shrugged and smiled, nudging Arthur along with his shoulder. “Guin thinks you’re adorable when you run on about philosophy. I might agree with her, incredibly enough.”

Somehow that compliment emerged from Lancelot’s mouth as a vague insult. He wandered on to examine a pair of swords hanging on the wall, nodding approvingly at them. They were by far not the most ornamented or elegant ones in the room, but they had an efficient, brisk air to them that made up for the lack of visual appeal.

An unkind little voice in Arthur’s head added that they also wouldn’t compete with Lancelot’s face for attention. Previously it had sounded like his old headmaster, but recently he’d noticed it taking on a distinct tinge of Guinevere. “I wouldn’t have assumed you were the museum type.”

“I’m not. This—” Lancelot swept out an arm and made his coat dramatically whirl “—depresses me. It’s all so carefully preserved, carefully handled and framed and so everyone forgets about the complete shite of a world it came from.” He held the oddly sober pose for a second before dropping hands in pockets and rocking back on his heels, all sly humor again. “Had a _medieval_ case once. Cracked nobleman from Italy—he was running drugs and he had a disagreement with his logistics man. Cut off the poor bloke’s head with the family sword. Now that’s what these are, and not this…shininess.”

“So what are you doing here?” Arthur asked, a bit stung. Though he could see Lancelot’s point, he would’ve thought the man would have at least respected the history and the knowledge preserved in the artifacts.

Lancelot looked slantwise at Arthur, then sank back to stand flat-footed and chin lifted. He was still grinning, but now it had a faint, inexplicable hint of deprecation to it. A fragmented example of chain-mail horse’s armor seemed to draw his eyes away, but a moment later he was flicking his eyes at Arthur’s face, checking their shoes, wandering over the wall behind them. Finally he settled down and sighed himself into stillness. “Wondering what the hell you’re doing here. It’s very…military.”

He said the last word very quietly, gaze scanning Arthur’s face as if he were little fearful of Arthur’s reaction. It was an understandable wariness, even if it stung Arthur in an entirely different way. Suddenly he wanted very badly to wrap his fingers in the ends of Lancelot’s tie and just stare at the man, feeling the way Lancelot’s chest would rise and fall against the back of his hand.

Instead, Arthur turned around and looked about the room. “I don’t think you can take strategy out of life, no matter what your lifestyle. It’s not something I can shut off—for that matter, it’s not something that in and of itself is wrong, and it can produce some beautiful things. Or it can make hell on earth. I like coming here because I can see both its potential for good and for evil. A sword has two edges, after all. It’s a useful reminder.”

After a moment, Lancelot apparently judged Arthur to be all right for the time being. He even went so far as to snicker. “Of how knights used to be great clunking bastards in prissy gold-plated suits?”

The corners of Arthur’s mouth insisted on pulling up, though his voice remained sufficiently obedient to sound disapproving. “Now you’re just being provocative.”

“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” Lancelot slouched a few inches closer and eyed Arthur through lowered lashes. “Is it working?”

Arthur suddenly had the urge to roll his eyes, which he hadn’t had in…actually, he didn’t think he could remember. He finally spotted what he’d been searching for and began walking towards it; they had another twenty minutes before the museum traffic began to pick up enough to annoy. It should be enough. And Arthur should be blushing—he was feeling vaguely uneasy, as if his skin were an ill-tailored suit, but far less than he normally would. “How’s the case with Morton?”

“Down to the labwork. Forensics says they couldn’t recover enough usable DNA to put him there. Guin’s going back tomorrow night to look over the place again, see if they missed anything. Doubtful—I was around for most of evidence collection, and they went over the place with a fine-toothed comb…” When they stepped out of the exhibit and into the side-hall, Lancelot started to look suspicious again. He grabbed Arthur’s sleeve and pulled them into a nearby restroom. “What’s the hurry?”

Instead of answering, Arthur walked into the stall farthest from the door. His shoes clicked rather loudly on the floor, so he should have ample warning if anyone else walked inside.

“Arthur? Arthur! Damn it, you had better not be stonewalling me—I get my fill of that at woooo—” Lancelot shut up on that ragged note and stared as Arthur backed him up against the door. He raised a tentative hand. “What are you—”

Arthur didn’t slap it away, but he did make it clear that he wanted it and its partner against the wall. He leaned in that extra inch and pressed harder on Lancelot’s wrists, lips before letting go and dropping to his knees. It felt awkward to merely undo the other man’s trousers, so Arthur rushed that a bit and felt even more ridiculous about things. But then—typical, no underwear—he had a simple, straightforward problem to handle and he did so. The first few swallows he took slowly, letting rusty muscle-memory guide his mouth till he could brush the cobwebs off his more exact recollections. Then he took a breath, braced his hands on Lancelot’s suddenly trembling legs and shoved forward till he could feel the back of his throat protesting.

Fingers groped at Arthur’s hair and he promptly drew back. The word was lumpy and ill-balanced in his mouth, but somehow it came out without him making a fool of himself. “ _Wall_.”

The retort never made it out of Lancelot’s eyes, dying before it came close to landing on his tongue. He started to put his hand back, but he did it rather slowly and so Arthur was delicately licking at the tip of his cock before his palm had quite found the wall. It did then, and with a ringing smack. “Oh, Christ…”

A little teeth, and then a not-quite perfect imitation of that devastating tongueflick-swallow Guinevere could do. Lancelot’s head went back and he staggered, slid down the wall an inch and of course that much further into Arthur’s mouth; Arthur briefly gagged, swallowed through it and sped up. He pushed his heels down on Lancelot’s legs to make the man straighten and then, when that produced an interesting change in moan, started to knead Lancelot’s thighs. Rubbed his fingers up and down in time to the working of his mouth. Let his longest fingers drag a little behind and then drift up farther, crawling over the rumpling top of Lancelot’s trousers to tickle bare skin.

“Oh, my God. Where the hell did you—oh God. God fucking god harder…” Lancelot spilled his speech like the syllables were drops from a brimming cup held by a shaking hand. He scrabbled at the wall, fingers frantic flickering things on the very edge of Arthur’s peripheral vision. Then Lancelot whimpered and grabbed for the top edge of the door, clung to it and bucked a few times.

Arthur took that to mean he was nearly done and, instead of backing off as Lancelot appeared to assume he would, tightened his lips around Lancelot’s prick and treated it like he would a straw floating in a thick milkshake. His hands felt the shudder start deep in Lancelot’s legs and quickly race up the man’s body, while his mouth was busy ignoring the bitterness of Lancelot’s come.

“Christ,” Lancelot repeated, dangling from his grip on the door-top. He continued to stare at the ceiling while Arthur stood up and checked his knees for dirt—none, thankfully—then redid the front of Lancelot’s trousers. “Christ. I actually could see you on horseback, giving orders.”

“Replace the horse with an unmarked van and you wouldn’t be too far off,” Arthur quietly said. He lifted a hand to Lancelot’s face, cupped it and ran his thumb over the cheekbone so Lancelot turned to look at him. “You and Guin do realize what you’re doing when you say you—”

The reaction Lancelot wanted to have was sarcastic, but for once he suppressed it. He closed his eyes and nuzzled at Arthur’s hand. “Yes, we do.” Then the inevitable comment broke loose from the curb Lancelot had on it, but he softened it with a nibble at Arthur’s fingertips. “Someday you’re going to believe me the first time I say something, and I’ll die of shock.”

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t only how rushed the mess with Cerdic…why aren’t you—oh.” Now Arthur did roll his eyes. “You can move your hands. Though I’m certain you knew that already.”

“I did, but it’s much more fun to make you admit it,” Lancelot purred, swinging forward to switch stall door for Arthur’s neck. He curled his fingers into Arthur’s hair and dragged him down for a hungry kiss. 

When they came up for air, Arthur had a reluctant smile edging onto his face. “You’re positively insatiable.”

“Well, you know…hard to tell when the feast might end.” Lancelot abruptly looked away from Arthur after he’d said that, chewing his lip. He hadn’t sounded nearly as flippant as he’d obviously wanted to.

Arthur lost the smile, but gained a little bit of insight. He leaned forward and feathered his lips over Lancelot’s temple; a soft wisp of air sighed from the other man’s mouth and he turned back for another long kiss. His hand slid down to curve around Arthur’s neck, and his back bent into the palm Arthur was stroking up and down it. 

After a while, Lancelot backed off enough to reveal the return of his jauntiness. “Hmm…you know, I hear there’s a lovely modern metal-sculpture exhibit over at the Guggenheim. And after the first time you have public sex in a place, it gets much easier to do it—”

Sometimes it seemed like the only way to shut Lancelot up was to block his mouth with a tongue. Though to be honest, Arthur didn’t mind that at all…and it did keep at bay the creeping awareness that yes, he had just guaranteed that he’d blush any time the Met was mentioned for the rest of his life. Oh, God, he’d—

\--in a moment. He was still busy with Lancelot’s mouth.


	3. Literary Skirmish

“I’m done.” Mariette shuffled her papers together to form one perfect razor-sliced stack and primly laid it down on the table. At first she tried to push it across with only one finger, but the papers began to disarrange. Sighing, she used her whole hand and then hastily snatched it back, as if she were feeding a crocodile.

For a moment, Galahad didn’t want to disappoint her. But he reminded himself that disappointing her was exactly what he’d been plotting to do ever since Arthur had popped in and dropped off the assignment, and since Gawain had shoved it over because he had to go _carry shit_ for his _boyfriend_ while they went _shopping_. It was so disgusting Galahad hadn’t even had the words. Which had given Gawain the time to sneak out, damn him. “I need another minute,” Galahad said, tone sweet and unperturbed by any of his irritation. “I like to be careful with my first proofing. Saves time later.”

“Oh. Well. All right.” Each word clicked out of Mariette’s mouth. She looked as if she wanted to throw another book at Galahad, but Dagonet was checking some shelves nearby, and everyone knew he was religiously protective of the volumes under his guard.

Galahad slouched in his seat. Across the table—which was the widest one in the g-brary and which had been Mariette’s pick—the bristling was audible. He grinned behind the shield of his paper and slouched some more, hmm-ing as he read the proposal draft. She let out a flat little sigh and sat up straight as a ruler. After a moment of awkward staring over Galahad’s head, she picked up a newspaper someone had left and started reading with much snapping of the paper.

Goddamn prissy bitch. He had been perfectly willing to just act as if the whole thing hadn’t happened, but no, she had to start off their whole collaboration with: “I’d rather work with Gawain, but let’s just get this over with. Oh, and I’m never sleeping with you, so don’t worry about that.”

Well, he damned well wasn’t worrying. He had been snuggling up to a brunette with much more shapely breasts than hers last night, and he wasn’t feeling any lack just because of her.

“Are you done?” Mariette suddenly asked.

“No. Jesus, stop interrupting. It’ll just take longer that way.” And for that, Galahad deliberately counted to fifty before he even started reading again. He bet she hadn’t even had more than a couple words with Gawain, and she was already assuming that Gawain would be better.

That jackass. Sure, Tristan probably was fun in bed, but he couldn’t be _that_ good. Not to mention the frozen rats in the fridge, and the overall creepy way he could pop out of the scenery any time and anywhere. And his sense of humor just sucked.

On the other hand, Gawain was a lot happier. When they’d first showed up at Avalon, he’d mostly stayed in, studied a lot and been cranky all the time. The few times Galahad had dragged him out hadn’t worked too well, so eventually he’d had just let Gawain be, even though it bugged him to stagger home at three in the morning and still see Gawain hunched over a book. Honestly, they were a little behind because of shit that had damned well hadn’t been their fault, but not that much.

Mariette slapped the newspaper down and exhaled as if her breath was a throwing dagger. “I don’t have all day. I have a very important meeting later that I cannot miss.”

“It’s Saturday,” Galahad snorted, sitting up. “Arthur’s off at some museum, and Cobham’s up in Canada till Wednesday. Who the hell’d you be seeing?”

“None of your business,” Mariette sniffed. Her chin was up and her nose was stabbing holes in the air, but her shoulders were crouched forward as if she were expecting an attack.

She was so very obviously lying. She probably didn’t have a damn thing to do—it’d been what, six days since she’d arrived, and her advisor was gone and there wasn’t anyone else around that Galahad thought knew her. If she was hurrying somewhere, it was home so she could curl up on the couch and work really hard and…goddamn it, Gawain never stopped nagging even when he wasn’t around. Galahad resigned himself to being nice.

“Sorry, but we’re closing up early today.” Dagonet emerged from the stacks with two three-inch-thick books dangling light as feathers from his arm. He pointed to the little plastic flyer-holder sitting on the table. “Museum Studies is holding a workshop and they changed the location to here at the last minute.”

“We still have to go over the corrections. Kitty is expecting this done when she comes back.” The crack in Mariette’s composure wasn’t there for too long, but it was deep enough to show a little bit of hysteria edging her protest. Man, she was uptight.

Galahad ignored her frantic look and shoved his stuff into his bookbag. He prepared himself for an unexpected free afternoon—and at the last time, Gawain’s stupid voice took over. “Okay, we’ll get out of your way. Come on; we can just finish at my place. Two minutes’ walk from here.”

Mariette stood up, books hugged to her chest like they were armor, and reluctantly walked away. She turned around and started to slow, but Dagonet was already starting to move chairs, which left her with no option. The exchange students got put up in a dorm over twenty minutes’ walk away, and she and Galahad had a shitload of books to carry.

They were on the sidewalk outside the building when Galahad finally couldn’t take it anymore. Stupid girl had stayed on the other side of the table as long as she could, and when she’d run out of table, she’d just kept going as if there was an invisible one in between them. “For fuck’s sake, I’m seeing other people. I don’t _want_ to have sex with you, all right? I don’t get it up for girls who throw shit at me. That make you feel better?”

“Of course it doesn’t,” she snapped, marching up the steps. Her admittedly nice ass was shaking right in Galahad’s face, but for once he was wishing he could look at something else. She yanked at the door handle so hard that she nearly fell over when it didn’t open. Duh. New York. “Do you have to be so offensive?”

“I could pretty it up for you, but we’d both still know it was nasty shit, so I don’t see the point.” Galahad elbowed her aside and shoved his key into the lock till he heard the old tumblers clicking, then turned it. He opened the door and swung himself in. “Normally I’d hold the door, but I understand that’s supposed to be insulting to women.”

The door glance-banged off Mariette’s bag, but she made it in without any trauma except for the murder in her eyes. “You’re just exploiting a stereotype. I expected better from a grad student.”

“Yeah, I’m a _grad_ student. I’m not a fucking butler.” Down the hall, Galahad could hear doors softly creaking open and at least one wolf-whistle. His neighbors probably thought he was having a goddamned tiff with his girlfriend, and later they’d be all fake sympathy. Fuckers. “Look, not everyone gets to be born with a dictionary in their mouths. Fuck, I was lucky if I got three meals a day.”

Oops. Here he was, thinking about how much condescending compassion pissed him off, and now he’d just given Mariette her cue to be exactly that. She started to say something and he slammed his heels into the floor as he walked off to cover it up—didn’t work too well, since he had on sneakers, but he was pretty good at ignoring pity-speeches. Only way he ever managed to watch his mother work her sugar-daddies without heaving. Well, that and the fact that he could always hit the fire-escape, slide two floors down to Gawain’s window and not be missed for at least a week.

“Galahad—”

“Don’t even, okay?” he muttered, fighting with the lock on his and Gawain’s apartment. The original one had been royally fucked, so they’d replaced it with one so good the shitty wood door didn’t deserve it and acted like it. “All I want to do is get this proposal fixed so the goddamn dean will approve it for both departments and—”

\--not walk in on Gawain’s bare ass. Galahad loved Gawain, really—he had actually killed people and hidden the bodies for Gawain’s sake—but no. Just…especially when it was bobbing like that, and accompanied by moaning in two voices.

“ _Oh_.” Mariette had somehow squeezed in beside Galahad and was now staring raptly at Gawain’s suddenly frozen ass. “Oh, he’s…”

“Out, out, out.” Taking her by the arm, Galahad hauled them back into the hall and yanked the door after them. Then he let go, just in case she was going throw a fit about a touch, and went halfway down the staircase so he could sit on a step that didn’t _look_ dirty. “Oh, you fucking bastard. And you complain about me…”

Hesitant feet followed him, edging daintily around the handful of cigarette butts that littered the steps. They stopped just behind him. “He’s…he’s…”

“Yeah. What, gonna start off on another speech?” Galahad put his head in his hands and tried to massage away his impending headache. The package Avalon gave its grad students, plus Arthur’s personal amendments, was pretty damn good, but it didn’t come close to covering shit like this.

Man, he wanted a cigarette.

“Why would I do that?” It was another two seconds before Mariette swallowed her pride enough to put down her backpack and lean against the rail. Her hair was starting to come out of her prissy bun and it almost softened her annoyed look. “You’re the one with problems about women.”

“I really hope you didn’t just call Gawain a woman. And I seem to get along fine with most girls, so maybe it’s just you.” No, the headache wasn’t leaving.

Her sputtering didn’t help, either. Especially since she snapped French for the first couple of minutes, and Galahad knew English, Spanish, Cantonese and as much Latin as he needed to understand law terms, but not French.

“I—I did not mean he was a—and if those women were self-respecting-- _women_ \--they wouldn’t—” Mariette snarled and threw up her hands. “Why the—the hell do you have to be the—the straight one?”

“Um. I’m not interrupting, am I? Oh, Mariette. Hi.” When Galahad turned around, there was a sheepish Gawain in jeans and nothing else staring back at him. Gawain frowned. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you said—”

Galahad pinched the bridge of his nose and reminded himself that this was still better than L. A. “We got kicked out. Some workshop needed the space. So—yeah. I think maybe the coffee shop down the street…”

“We were going, so you can come in.” Tristan walked out, looking completely unconcerned with the whole situation. He paused by Gawain to hold a short whispered conversation—the bits Galahad heard might have been apologies for hearing but not warning Gawain in time, but Tristan didn’t exactly look sorry—and moved on.

Mariette gave him a funny look and muttered something in French, to which Tristan answered. In French. She promptly threw on an insulted face, which raised Tristan a few pegs in Galahad’s view.

“Yeah, you can…I need to get dressed…” Gawain ducked back inside long enough to get a shirt, then jogged after Tristan. He stopped by Galahad and bent down to whisper, looking both embarrassed and defensive. “Um. I’m going to—and you know, you can’t really complain about—oh, fuck, the couch--”

“Just go play with the stupid squirrels, or whatever you two are off to do. I’ll clean the damned couch. But you’re cooking dinner.” Galahad sighed, standing up. He grabbed his bag and headed for the apartment while Gawain took off, still blushing.

Good thing the furniture was fake leather. It was hell on bare skin—stuck if you sweated the tiniest bit and then hurt like a bastard to peel away from—but it was easy to wipe off. Galahad dropped his bag just inside by the door, then got a rag from the kitchenette. He flipped up the faucet handle and started getting it wet. “Mariette? You coming in, or are you still laughing?”

“I am _not_ laughing. What would be funny?” she shot back. Though she was careful not to look in the couch’s direction as she shut the door.

Well, that was true. She had a lousy sense of humor. Which reminded Galahad of someone. “So you and Tristan…know each other, or what?”

“That—that—my parents are full professors at the Sorbonne, and good friends of Arthur’s. He taught a semester there as a guest professor, and he brought that—frogs! I wanted to know what Tristan was holding and he opened his hands and a frog jumped at me! It got tangled in my hair and—you’re laughing at me.” Mariette pouted, remembered she was supposed to be more mature than that, and switched to scowling.

“Uh, yeah. If it had been me and him, and I was telling you the same story, you’d laugh your head off at me.” Galahad wrung out the rag before unfolding it. He thought about waving Mariette into the next room, but then decided that hey, if they were going to be adults, she could deal with watching him do a little housekeeping. So he just went ahead and took care of the mess Gawain and Tristan had made of the couch.

She opened her mouth to deny that, but then closed it. After a moment, Mariette got a look on her face that pretty much embodied what Galahad’s headache felt like. She sat down on a stool and covered her eyes with her hand. “You’re honest, at least.”

“Great. Now, let’s be brutally honest and fix the stupid proposal so I can pump you for details about Tristan.” Of course she shot him a curious glance, which Galahad returned with a shrug. “What? You think you’re the only person he’s ever annoyed?”

“Which is not necessarily a good quality,” she muttered, digging in her bookbag. Mariette found her list…which was depressingly long. “Point one: I don’t think the wording in the first paragraph properly reflects the aim of the project. It should be…”

Somewhere along the line, Galahad had asked for this. He was such a fucking idiot.


	4. Forensic Mind

“How was the museum?” Guinevere asked, slipping out of her jacket. She neatly folded it over her bag, which she set on the floor by the door. Then she passed latex gloves to Arthur and snapped on a pair herself. Her hair had been hastily clipped back, and strands were already escaping to drift over her nose and cheeks. They were the only softness about her as she purposefully moved around the room. “Or should I ask how grabby the prat was?”

Arthur concentrated on putting on the gloves so he had a good reason for hiding his flush. “The exhibit was excellent. And Lancelot was not a prat. He also, er, kept his hands to himself.”

“Nice to hear that for once.” Though Guinevere didn’t quite sound as if she believed him. She walked into the bedroom, absently waving for Arthur to follow. “Happened in here. He was in bed and the shooter was…stop there. He was right where you were standing, according to the shot trajectory.”

Guinevere had stopped by the bed, which had had its mattress dragged to the floor and its rust-stained sheets lightly dusted with feathers; it seemed a few of the bullets had gutted the pillows. There were drag marks leading from the bed to a nearby window, which was closed. She went over to it and pushed it up.

“The neighbors were throwing fits about having to stare at a murder scene, so we had to tape plastic over the stains,” she said, backing off to let Arthur stick his head out the window.

The dull sheen of ripped-up black garbage-bag plastic patched the fire escape and parts of the small landing just outside. Arthur carefully peeled up the tape and took a peek. “Still only the victim’s?”

“All of it. Ballistics checked out his gun and he got off one shot, but there’s no bullethole that corresponds to it. So the hitman had to have walked off with it still in him.” Her voice faded and rose as she restlessly paced about the room, triple-checking possible places for stains. It was remotely possible that the shot had struck in such a way as to not result in any blood splatter at all, but that would require an absurd degree of luck. And for the shooter to then exit the building without dripping blood anywhere required another bit on top of that.

“Occam’s Razor,” Arthur muttered, pressing the tape back down. He stepped back and stared at the bloodstains, the rumpled sheets, the faint imprints that their shoes had left in the thick shag carpeting.

Guinevere stripped off her gloves and tossed them on her last round about the room. She finally settled for leaning against the wall, arms crossed and glare focused on the window. “Lancelot suggested that we check for detergents, just on the off-chance that the hitman spent a half-hour he wouldn’t have had scrubbing up after himself.”

Her version was surprisingly close to the one Arthur had gotten from Lancelot, though her tone implied that Lancelot had been a jackass, and Lancelot’s had said a good deal about the frustration of staring at the same room for nearly twelve hours and not getting anywhere. It certainly wasn’t the most improbable explanation that could’ve been offered, yet she’d apparently had a bad enough reaction to it to later provoke Lancelot into a fifteen-minute rant on her temper. Normally he ran about five.

“Those bloody lab boys thought that was hilarious. Pricks.” She sniffed and stared at the bathroom door, her profile echoing the Republic-era Roman cameos Arthur had been appreciating only a few hours before. But no chisel however fine could have exactly caught the nervous way she shook out a cigarette, shoved it back in, and instead nibbled on her fingertip.

The only time Guinevere smoked, as far as Arthur could tell, was either when she was thinking hard or when she was trying equally hard to not think on something. “What’d they say?”

He kept half-an-ear to her as he slowly turned about, scanning the room. Hopefully that would elicit a long answer; he needed enough of his conscious mind engaged to make sure he didn’t drift. Except for the episode with Cerdic—and that had been adrenaline and instinct and fear for the others more than anything else—he hadn’t tried to do this in literal years. It shouldn’t be too different than attempting to ascertain a writer’s intent from a close analysis of the words used, but then, philosophical research involved ideals and not the contradictory, grimy truth that was real human psychology.

“Oh, they didn’t say anything.” There was a low sharp snap as she put up her heel against the wall. A moment later, she began to impatiently rock on it. “I think I’ve made it clear I can bitch for longer than they can keep up the harassment, so they generally don’t.”

Placement of objects and the victim’s bloodstains were in accordance with the scenario that he’d been shot from the doorway, then dragged across to the window and hung outside of it: a gruesome warning, but unfortunately, a commonplace one in Arthur’s experience. Probably the victim had been still waking and caught rising from bed. He would’ve dove for the gun and then he’d gotten off that shot, but from there it should’ve gone high. Harder to be jumping out of bed and shooting at the ground at the same time than to be shooting up.

“I don’t understand what’s their problem, anyway. They’ve seen bloody women in skirts before. And anyway, they’re scientists. They should know better than to generalize,” Guinevere snarled. The tapping of her foot increased in tempo.

“Generalize?” The man had also been a longtime assassin himself, so he would’ve been shooting for vital places. Odds of him hitting a place that’d throw blood around increased. But then, Guinevere had said the room had been dark, and even assassins weren’t perfect. This one had had a good time beforehand—BAC of .25 plus cocaine, recent sex—so his reflexes could have been off. He could have been…Arthur walked back over to the door.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Guinevere curiously watching him. She started to say something, then cut it off and returned to her previous subject. “They meet one bimbo in a skirt, they think any woman wearing a skirt’s brainless. They meet a woman with no make-up, hair a disaster and wearing baggy jeans, they think ah! Someone with mental capacity.”

Thinking from the point-of-view of the man that had been shot hadn’t yielded anything, so Arthur tried the hitman’s perspective. Perhaps the assassin had known beforehand that his mark would be incapacitated by drugs and sex, but no one knowledgeable would have relied only on that, unless they’d added a tranquilizer to the mix. And if they’d had the chance to do that, then why not use poison in the first place? So no, they’d had to shoot him. Which only circled back to the lack of blood from the killer…

“And I spent all that damn time trying to talk to them, too—God, I wish I could have one time where I can get information without having to flash cleavage and then spend ten minutes telling them sex is absolutely not going to happen. Lancelot only goes there if someone drags him—labs or anything to do with rigorous thinking scare him—and yet they’re perfectly deferential to him. It’s—it’s—”

“Infuriating?” Arthur put a hand on the doorframe and looked into the next room. He saw the footprints he and Guinevere had made, now shapeless depressions but still faintly visible. The report hadn’t mentioned any tracks by the hitman, though of course they might’ve faded or been trampled by the maid who’d discovered the body. “I’ve had colleagues that thought like that, and I never could understand it. They’d be frustrated to no end trying to have the simplest conversations, or they’d be too busy being repulsed to follow what was being said. I mean—not that I’d be repulsed if you wore trousers, because you have some very becoming skirts, and I’d—”

A soft chuckle and a finger laid over his lips interrupted him. Guinevere’s thumb curved around his jaw and pushed his face towards hers so she could kiss him very slowly and thoroughly. When she backed off, her smile was lazily affectionate. “You’re never going to understand why the wait-lists for your classes are the longest in the college, but I like you anyway.”

Then she kissed him again, which spared him from even attempting to figure out what she’d meant. It even distracted him for a good five seconds from their purpose in being here, though eventually his mind firmly reminded him. “Guinevere—”

“Don’t make out at a crime scene?” she teased, nibbling at his jaw. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Temporarily used up for the day.” Actually, he hadn’t been thinking about the inappropriateness of the situation, but now that she’d brought it up, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He tried not to look too disgusted.

Unfortunately, he failed. Fortunately, Guinevere just laughed and didn’t seem to hold it against him. “Did Lancelot actually talk you into sex at the Met? Dear God—you realize the more you feed him, the more he’ll ask for.”

“The idea had occurred to me,” Arthur dryly replied. He did better at not showing how amused he was by that comment coming from her, seeing as she didn’t seem to have any compunctions against putting his office to un-scholastic uses.

She laughed again and patted his cheek while he slowly looked up, wondering how on earth he was going to translate his hunch into reason. But once more, Guinevere surprised him: she looked upwards herself, frowning. Then her eyes went wide and she gasped. Narrowed her eyes and hummed thoughtfully.

Her hand landed on his shoulder; he was already stooping to grab the foot she lifted. She was a little lighter than he’d expected, so he had to awkwardly cut short his heave so as to not bang her head into the ceiling. Guinevere didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t care. What interested her was the tile right above them, which was the tiniest bit ajar. While Arthur attempted to hold her steady without grabbing too high, she lifted the tile. “Oh, my God.” Guinevere didn’t sound shocked so much as incredibly disgusted. “This—this is out of a movie! Grapple-hook scratches? What the hell were they playing at?”

“You’d be surprised at how influential movies can be,” Arthur grunted. Her knees were either bumping into his cheeks or smacking his nose, but the only way to avoid them was to look directly up her skirt. “Not everyone is ex-KGB or ex-MI6 or what-have-you. A lot just work their way from the street up.”

“And this one got lucky with his stunt. Though not for too long. I can see stains.” She spoke with all the relish of a cat savoring its very own bowl of cream. “Arthur. You realize sleeping together means you can, in fact, look. You’ve seen it before. This morning, for instance.”

Well, yes. But it still was—Arthur didn’t—thank God she was coming down and he didn’t have to wrestle with the issue any longer. He set her down as gently as he could, then started to straighten. His back made him pause halfway with a twinge that was slightly more than a warning, so he massaged the area and went more slowly. “Seems time’s catching up with me…”

“Not with what counts,” Guinevere murmured, leaning up to peck his nose. “Brilliant. That saves me a week’s worth. Now, I need to call the lab dicks and you need to get home.” She paused, then turned wide pleading eyes onto him. “But don’t let Lancelot wear you out, all right? I was looking forward to something fun after all this overtime.”

Arthur garbled an answer. He was getting rather good at that.


	5. Cosy Tea

Every Wednesday afternoon, Kitty and Merlin met up for tea and talk on the second-floor of a neighborhood café, which was a café in a fairly loose sense of the term. The downstairs was a store that sold incense, exotic teas, and some interesting books on the merits of substances that had been outlawed in most countries. Upstairs, a dreamy-eyed androgyne manned the tea bar and ostensibly kept watch over the patrons, but Kitty had seen people casually walk off with anything from cups to an entire table, so it was doubtful whether the bar-minder was even on the same plane of existence as everyone else.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere was always serene and lowkey, and the view from the window that took up nearly the whole of the wall facing the street was spectacular. It’d actually been Merlin who’d introduced Kitty to the place—he regularly held interviews here—and ever since, she’d been a regular patron of it.

“So what’s today’s flavor?” she asked, disposing her skirts about herself. Though she was not one of those women who favored underdressing far past their age for it, she saw no point in covering up a pretty ankle. Her knees, however, were a slightly different story…the price of gaining wisdom, apparently.

“I thought ‘Elevate the Senses’ might be a good choice.” Merlin handed her the tray, then propped his walking stick against the wall. His hands were gnarled and spindly, but they didn’t betray the slightest hint of age as they pulled out a chair for him. Sometimes it seemed as if time never touched him. “So what news from the philosophers? I assume current trends in economics or drama haven’t changed much since last week.”

She poured them both a cup and added milk to hers, but left his plain. An Asian colleague from the Drama department had gently remonstrated with her about the criminal act of adulterating good tea, but she cheerfully did so anyway. Milk and the odd splash of lemon were such delicate reminders of her college days in England, and she held onto them. “I would have thought you’d select the Tea of Inquiry in that case.”

“You’re being coy.” It was an observation, not an insult.

“Of course I am. The difference between a woman and a whore is often in the timing; one can’t give up everything at once.” Kitty placidly stirred her tea till it was a rich light tan, then tapped the drops off the spoon before setting in on the saucer. She lifted the cup to her mouth, took a deep appreciative sniff, and sipped.

Amused, Merlin let her have her moment. In all the years that she’d been at Avalon, she’d never quite managed to find out what made him tick, what stories wrote those intricate grooves in his stick. He had always been a calm, efficient mystery—a challenge. But it was nice to have something besides interminable academic quarrels to look forward to.

“If you were a whore, being called a good woman would soon become an insult,” Merlin finally said, trying his own cup. He took down a third of it in a deep, soundless draught; the steam rising from the tea snarled on his beard and turned him into something out of a fairy book. “How goes your joint class with Arthur?”

The one twist Kitty had ever managed to find about Merlin. Occasionally Arthur would mutter about some altercation or the other with Merlin, but when pressed, he’d always blink rapidly and mumble nonsense and slip away before she could stop him. He could be surprisingly slippery. And for such a gentleman, apparently quite inflammatory as well—normally Merlin handled rows with a subtly freezing diplomacy that saw both sides quite terrified of him, but the one time he’d been known to raise his voice, it’d been during a private meeting with Arthur. 

“Oh, wonderful. An amazing amount of work, but it’s been quite rewarding. In fact, I was about to look into making it a seasonal offering.” Kitty drank a little more tea before turning her attention to the delightful shortbread cookies the store offered. She always came home brushing crumbs out of her skirts, but she never could help herself. “That’s on my end, anyway. I have to say, I couldn’t tell you about Arthur’s. I’ve barely seen him these past two weeks.”

Merlin hummed low in his throat and reached for a cookie. He thoughtfully cracked it in half and spread jam on it. “Is his professionalism suffering?”

“Of course not. He’d get his work done if his desk was on fire.” Naughty metaphor in light of what Vanora said, but the words just seemed to trip off Kitty’s tongue. She hid her smile in another sip. “Actually, he seems to be more relaxed. And his grad students are settling in.”

Except for Galahad’s running war with Mariette, but so far Kitty saw no reason to bring that to Merlin’s attention. A little verbal friction could do wonders for widening people’s perceptions.

Well, that and the fact that Mariette was, as Arthur’s recommendation had delicately put it, “highly motivated.” If she didn’t have something to distract her, she’d run herself into the ground within the next month. Not to mention wear out Kitty like two children and a footloose ex-husband hadn’t. “Speaking of, Merlin—the philosophy department’s rather buzzing with speculation. And I’ve ended up comforting a surprising number of girls from Arthur’s class—that isn’t to say he’s done anything improper because he hasn’t, but they seem to be under the impression that he’s…taken.”

Of course Kitty knew the answer to that, but she was curious to see what Merlin had to say.

And Merlin decided to retreat into curmudgeonly behavior. “Should be a relief for Arthur. He won’t have to hold his office hours in the undergraduate library’s lobby anymore so Dagonet can be witness if they try anything.”

“Now _you’re_ being coy,” Kitty snorted, pouring herself more tea. Honestly. A few of the drama majors with whom she worked could take a page out of Merlin’s book for deadpan. “Oh, come on, Merlin. You know I’m only an occasional visitor to the Philosophy wing. Economics is never anything but depressing nowadays, and drama never does anything but rehash old spites.”

“A man’s private life is his private life, with the exception of when he makes it his public life. A difficult line to determine, admittedly, but from where I’m standing, Arthur hasn’t yet crossed it.” Merlin bit down into his shortbread as if to seal the discussion with his teeth. Occasionally he could give off an air of ancient wildness that was completely at odds with the old-fashioned gentry impression that usually surrounded him.

Kitty was far too advanced in years to pout, but that didn’t mean she had stopped wanting to. “You’re very fond of him.”

It had only been a hook thrown out on a whim, but surprisingly enough, it caught. Even more surprisingly, Merlin acknowledged that it’d caught. “I happened to head up Oxford’s philosophy department before I was offered the position of dean here. My term there and Arthur’s only overlapped by a year, but I remember him as being one of the most capable students I’ve ever encountered.”

Well, that was a fact Kitty hadn’t known; Arthur hadn’t mentioned it at all, and normally he was more than willing to talk about his years at Oxford. Though come to think about it, Kitty had always had the feeling that he was censoring himself. He could lie, but he almost never did it lightly, and so that made it easy to tell when he was. “I always said academia was incestuous. Brought him over the moment you heard he was looking for a new position?”

“And I always say that academics are kindest unkind people in the world. He was in rather high demand; I had a time getting him to pick Avalon.” Merlin finished his cup and poured a fresh one, then offered to do the same for Kitty. When she refused, he set the pot down and returned to applying himself to the cookies. “Same with you, if I remember correctly.”

“Oh, you know the moment I walked onto the campus, I fell in love. Hard not to, considering.” She winked at Merlin over the rim of her cup.

He received it with stony aplomb as usual. Now there was another pity—she’d never pretended that Arthur, if that had ever happened, would’ve been more than a fling (and he didn’t do flings), but Merlin would have been…interesting. It really was a shame he seemed to be a confirmed bachelor; he’d garnered his share of looks as recently as five years ago.

“Then I suppose I’ll just have to get myself invited to dinner if I ever want to know what’s happening in Arthur’s life,” Kitty sighed. She polished off her last sip before carefully dabbing at her lips with the napkin. “He does seem to attract the most fascinating people.”

Merlin’s composure cracked just enough for a hint of slyness to emerge. “I’d suggest you play the grandmother. Otherwise you’ll be provoking his household.”

“And of course, it’s never wise to make enemies of one’s friend’s…companions.” According to the clock, it was time for Kitty to run. She’d just come back from an economics conference in Toronto, and she hadn’t even unpacked, let alone started to hack at the work that had piled up in her absence. “I’ll be good, sir.”

Finally she got a twitch out of Merlin. “Disrespectful professors are the bane of my life,” he muttered, rising to see her off. He let her peck at his cheek, then stole the bill before she could lay down her half. “Next Wednesday I’ll be a bit late. Interdepartmental meeting.”

“I’ll content myself with a few extra cookies, then.” Kitty shouldered her purse and headed off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tea names are from The Republic of Tea.


End file.
